AI Engineer - Mission Innovation Lab

Position Overview

At the SEI AI Division we conduct research in applied artificial intelligence and practical AI engineering for Defense and National Security. As an AI Engineer who thrives at the intersection of deep‑learning research and production‑grade software development, you will translate cutting‑edge AI concepts into robust, mission‑scale solutions for the warfighting community. You will work with foundation models such as GPT and LLaMA, designing and deploying agentic workflows while applying advanced ML research across domains including natural language processing, computer vision, time series forecasting, and predictive analytics.

Key Responsibilities

• Design, develop, and fine‑tune a variety of AI models.
• Design autonomous agents and multi‑step pipelines using LangChain, ReAct, tool‑calling, or custom orchestration; employ the Model Context protocol to manage stateful interactions.
• Build Retrieval‑Augmented Generation pipelines that combine external knowledge bases with LLMs to improve factual accuracy for warfighting applications.
• Implement end‑to‑end data pipelines, ETL processes, and back‑end services (Python, C/C++, Java).
• Create CI/CD pipelines for model training, validation, containerized deployment (Docker/Kubernetes), and security scanning; maintain model registries, monitoring, and version control.
• Produce rapid prototypes, perform benchmarks, and conduct robustness/adversarial testing.
• Collaborate closely with senior ML engineers, software developers, and government customers; mentor junior staff and contribute to design reviews and documentation.
• Stay current with emerging LLM architectures, agentic paradigms, PEFT/LoRA methods, and AI‑safety techniques and translate new research into operational capabilities.

Required Qualifications

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Machine Learning, Statistics, Applied Mathematics, or a related field with at least four years of relevant experience (or an M.S. with two years).
• Ability to obtain and maintain an active Department of War (DoW) security clearance.
• Must be able and willing to work onsite 5 days per week at an SEI office in either Pittsburgh, PA or Arlington, VA.
• Proficiency in Python and at least one compiled language (C/C++ or Java); experience with REST/GraphQL APIs and containerization.
• Strong grasp of ML theory (supervised, unsupervised, reinforcement learning) and evaluation metrics.
• Hands‑on experience fine‑tuning LLMs using frameworks such as Hugging Face Transformers, LangChain, or comparable tools.
• Familiarity with building RAG pipelines (vector stores, dense/sparse retrievers) and experience with PEFT/LoRA methods.
• Understanding of Model Context protocols for managing model state across multi‑turn interactions.
• Experience building evaluation frameworks, benchmarks, or data quality pipelines.
• Exposure to TensorFlow, PyTorch, or JAX; knowledge of data‑pipeline tools (Airflow, Prefect, Ray) is a plus.
• Awareness of DevSecOps practices (CI/CD, GitOps, container security scanning, model‑registry concepts) is desirable.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience deploying LLM APIs (FastAPI, gRPC) at scale with effective latency and load balancing.
• Expertise in building multi‑tool agents, planner‑executor loops, or tool‑calling pipelines for complex decision‑making.
• Experience conducting adversarial testing, implementing input sanitization, and contributing to AI‑safety research.
• Familiarity with utilizing GPU/TPU resources, mixed‑precision training, and distributed training frameworks such as DeepSpeed or ZeRO.
• Prior work on defense, intelligence, or government‑focused AI projects and familiarity with DoW acquisition or compliance processes.
• Contributions to open‑source AI/ML libraries, agentic frameworks, or context‑protocol implementations.

Benefits & Perks

• Competitive Salary and comprehensive employee benefits (visit “Why Carnegie Mellon” for more information).
• Opportunities to work on mission‑critical projects that support defense and national security.
• Professional growth in an innovative and collaborative environment.
• Access to cutting‑edge research and development as part of an elite team at a globally recognized institution.